Audiopile Review: New Haven, Connecticut drone-folk duo Tongue Depressor follow up last year’s bleak soundscaping for Worried Songs with this new collaborative effort with viola (and sirens!) player Austin Larkin, a frequent guest on their past releases. Comprised of two side-long pieces, the trio are off and droning on Side A with a slow rising, bone-chilling intensity, Larkin’s siren adding a particularly gnarly and menacing edge. As Byron Coley recently said, “some of the best siren playing i’ve heard in many years of tug boat monitoring.” Hard to argue! The B-side is more of the slow-crawling funeral drone we’ve become accustomed to from the crew—the sawing of the viola, violin and bagpipes strike the impossible balance between meditative and earth-shaking. Music to reset your brain to. Edition of 200 on black vinyl.

Tongue Depressor (New Haven, CT) is the duo of Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey. They write, improvise, and perform drone-based music with fiddles, pedal steel, lap steel, contrabass, organ, and bells, usually involving micro- tonal tunings and rearranged /retuned fragments of American church music. Austin Larkin (New Haven, CT) uses elements of tone, interstices of fields, asymmetries, and patterns. Performance and practice informed by re- search into dimensions of vibrating bodies. On this recording Tongue Depressor and Austin Larkin have combined to record what they had been practicing on the road live across the US together. Henry Birdsey (TD) plays bagpipes and lap steel. Zach Rowden (TD) plays violin and tapes. Austin Larkin plays viola and sirens (which he himself constructed and are a story unto themselves). Soothing sounds give way to unsettling / unnerving feelings when the sirens find their way through meditative loops.